A good friend of mine ran across the articles of Gentoo on linuxtoday and passed them off to me. I quickly looked at the screenshots page (thinking this was just another Lindows/Redhat/blah distro) and wasn't impressed, so I closed the window and forgot about it.

I then ran across Gentoo again in another article, and actually took the time to read it... that is when I found out the true Gentoo power! <smashing head through monitor>

In all seriousness, as a power user (self-proclaimed at least) and speed freak, the whole CONCEPT for Gentoo had me wetting my pants from the first time I read the about page and all the documentation until the time I was booting KDE and using it (from a recent RedHat 7.3beta2 install). I don't need to tell the Gentoo users here about the speed increases... but damn I was impressed!

I was finally running a system that was comparable in speed to Windows XP for me, the fact that KDE 3 uses the patented SweetAssDesktop(tm) technology helps a lot, but compiling and installing Gentoo was just fun in a computer-nerdy sort of way as well!

This isn't to mention also that I am running this on an nForce board with all the onboard support working just fine.

I am sending a giant virtual hug to the whole Gentoo team, keep up the good work!

It seems to me, that Slackware is excellent for learning. You get to do everything by hand and get to see how stuff really works. RedHat tries to hide most everything from the user. Lets give them a gui to do everything. It was nice for a while stuff just automagically worked. But then it got old as I would update packages, the gui would become out of date, broken, etc. Gentoo is like the best of both worlds. You do the nitty-gritty like Slack, but stuff like dependencies and setting up NVidia support still works almost automagically. It seems to me almost as stable as Slack, much faster than RedHat, and an all around great system. I am thoroughly impressed.

gentoo totally rocks! I've been using gnu/linux since .99r16 and have moved from sls,slackware,debian,redhad,suse and although each have their merits, gentoo embodies the hacker spirit. Thanks for the great work guys/gals!